The Legends of the Tannaim

Dedicated to Dr. Zunz, the grandmaster of Jewish scholarship, on his 90th birthday.

Preface

The aims and guiding principles I had in mind while working on the agadah (legends) of the tannaim,¹ I outlined already in my introduction to The Agadah of the Babylonian Amoraim, which appeared in 1878 (Strasbourg: Trübner). Here I wish to add only a few remarks to what I wrote there. Above all, I deem it necessary to emphasize that the current work presents only the agadah of individual tannaim in chronological order and is not meant to be an exhaustive presentation of the entire tannaitic agadah. However, the aggadic material from the period of the tannaim preserved in the talmudic and midrashic literature without attribution to authors is just as abundant and significant as the material that has come to us with attributions to authors and which is the sole subject matter of this book. In it I tried to solve a problem of literary history pertaining to aggadic writing, which is to determine the share of individual tannaim in collections of sayings attributed to multiple authors. Insofar as the agadah is first and foremost biblical interpretation and application, the following chapters are also chapters about the history of old Jewish exegesis and homiletics; and insofar as the agadah deals with diverse questions of religious belief and insight, one may regard my work also as a contribution to the history of religious views within Judaism. I tried to organize as clearly as possible the sayings attributable to single authors. Where the abundance of material demanded it, I sorted it under different headings that are determined by the nature of the material to be examined; hence they differ for individual tannaim. I felt compelled to pay particular attention to the variants offered by different sources in which the same saying can be found; hence for passages in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbinowitz’s important collection of variants [Dikduke soferim] was used. For the purpose of this study, the variants in the sources and the differences in the transmitted texts that relate to the authorship of individual sayings are of particular importance; when they didn’t escape me, I always pointed them out, and, wherever possible, I tried to determine the true originator of an utterance. I also emphasized the names of those who passed on the saying of an earlier author to the extent that they are mentioned in the sources. Regarding the credibility of the sources concerning the authorship of individual aggadic sayings, I am accepting as correct the assumption of Zunz (Gottesdienstliche Vorträge [liturgical sermons], p. 315) that, in general, one ought not to call it into question. In this regard, one must take note that congruent information is found in Babylonian and Palestinian sources that are independent of each other as literary works. Still, it is only natural, given the long oral tradition, that for many sayings variant or incorrect information evolved and this must be considered when determining the authenticity of individual sentences. The sheer mass of anonymous sayings is, in fact, a considerable argument in favor of the general credibility of statements of authorship. Since the normative process of passing on texts left orphaned statements unnamed after knowledge was lost of their authors, it may therefore claim all the more credibility for the authenticity of those sentences whose originators it mentions. It is a different matter for those creations, especially the later, and specifically the mystical agadah, that are either entirely pseudoepigraphic, such as the Alphabet of R. Akiba, or that, individually, contain, besides authentic sentences by older authors, also sayings whose attributions, usually to old and famous teachers, were made up. For the sake of completeness, I mention for the individual tannaim these pseudepigraphic sayings whose connection to the authors they name was not always arbitrary but occasionally reveals a certain system. Listing and discussing my sources here is all the less necessary, as the history of the tannaim and their impact in particular has been presented comprehensively and in many aspects exhaustively in the well-known works by Frankel (Darkhe ha-mishnah, 1859); Weiß (Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Tradition, Dor dor ve-dorshav, 2 parts, 1871 and 1876); Brüll (Mevo ha-mishnah, 1876); Grätz (Geschichte der Juden, vol. VI, 2nd ed. 1866); and Derenbourg (Essai sur l’histoire et la géographie de la Paléstine, part I, 1867). For the sake of brevity, I reference quotations from these works by giving only the name of the author, followed by the page number. For quotations from Talmud and Midrash I kept to the usual system; for the Tosefta I used Zuckermandel’s edition.